Caroline Busta

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  print December 2021

  BEST SHOWS OF 2021

  THE TL;DR OF ANNE IMHOF’S monumental “Natures Mortes” exhibition at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo is that it was a requiem for twentieth-century subculture—if not for the twentieth century, full stop. 

  In its institutional grandeur alone, the setup already evoked earlier art systems: Curators Emma Lavigne and Vittoria Matarrese invited Imhof to participate in the Palais’s “Carte Blanche” series (inaugurated by Ugo Rondinone in 2007), offering the German artist open use of Europe’s largest center of contemporary art (236,806 square feet). Imhof asked for no less than stripping the venue down to its

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  print September 2020

  Where we’re at: Berlin, Rotterdam, Istanbul, Madrid, Turin

  CAROLINE BUSTA
  BERLIN
  

  TFW in the middle of the odd Corona Summer, when the club has been closed for months, an artist explodes five centuries of history into an operatic “queer Black retelling of the colonial project from sugarcane to ketamine.” Made possible by Trauma Bar und Kino, which navigated virus guidelines to safely open its subterranean space for two nights, and hosted by New Models (which, full disclosure, I co-run), Richard Kennedy’s Fubu Fukú put five stunning bodies onstage—namely, those of Miss Hollywood, Fernando Casablancas, PK Gyaba, Peter Fonda, and the artist—all fitted with

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  print October 2019

  THE DISCOURSE

  THIS SUMMER, on the placid waters of Switzerland’s Lake Neuchâtel, the artist Daniel Keller and I gave a talk on “deep adaptation,” an extreme yet increasingly mainstream response to impending climate catastrophe. Titled “New Models Module: Imagining Collapse,” the lecture looked to the far reaches of digital networks (guided by artist Joshua Citarella’s work on Gen Z culture) to convey the spectrum of disparate, radical ideations of post-collapse societies that have been gaining traction online.

  Heading home the next day, we changed trains at Biel/Bienne, where just beyond the station’s entrance

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  previews May 2019

  “ANNE IMHOF: SEX”

  Curated by Hendrik Folkerts

  Few artists distill the feeling of postmillennial disaffection as deftly as Anne Imhof, whose ethereal performances include such mediagenic elements as razors, fire, young people vaping, and drones. Imhof also makes inventive use of the Berghain-scale crowds that come to view her work live: For Faust, 2017, at the Venice Biennale, she outfitted the German pavilion with an elevated glass floor so that the piece could unfold not only amid her visitors but inches below them—immediate but untouchable, as if happening on-screen. Now Imhof is back with Sex, a work presented

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  print December 2018

  Caroline Busta

  1 JUTTA KOETHER (MUSEUM BRANDHORST, MUNICH; CURATED BY ACHIM HOCHDÖRFER AND TONIO KRÖNER WITH KIRSTEN STORZ) In a time when tablets and smartphones have become the default viewing zone for most art, this exacting survey gave us a clear, IRL perspective on the career output of an artist-feminist for whom the canvas itself serves as a kind of screen. Paintings, for Koether, are less objects than interfaces—membranes for receiving and transmitting data. But the passage of information through her work is never glitch-free, and perhaps this is by design. “Jutta Koether: Tour de Madame” presents

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  previews January 2018

  “Marc Camille Chaimowicz: Your Place or Mine . . .”

  In 1972, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, sharing a space with Gustav Metzger and Stuart Brisley, laid out an array of tinsel, tourist kitsch, and other tailings of human life lived on the floor, calling the piece Celebration? Real Life Revisited. The work’s title, along with its self—supported lighting scheme—the glow of devotional candles and gelled stage spots refracted by decommissioned disco balls—stands, now, as a prescient nod to the post-Fordist Thatcherism that was to come. Before the 1980s, however, the British artist, who was born in 1947 to a Polish

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  previews September 2014

  Taipei Biennial 2014: “The Great Acceleration”

  Dubbed “The Great Acceleration,” the ninth iteration of the Taipei Biennial reflects the fact that the acute social, technological, and economic growth witnessed (and caused) by late-twentieth-century life has so impacted our biosphere that many have begun referring to the present day as the “Anthropocene,” a new geological epoch. To grapple with this radical shift, curator Nicolas Bourriaud expands on his famed 1990s-era theorization of relational aesthetics to encompass interactions among “human beings, animals, plants, machines, products and objects” in a biennial

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  diary May 24, 2014

  Maidan Voyage

  A WEEK before Ukraine’s anticipated elections, PinchukArtCentre, located in central Kyiv just a few minutes’ walk from the city’s Maidan Square, opened coinciding solo shows by three young Ukrainian artists: Nikita Kadan, Zhanna Kadyrova, and Artem Volokitin. Collectively titled “Fear and Hope,” the presentation, curated by the center’s deputy artistic director, Bjorn Geldhof, addresses recent political activity in the region and the structural and psychological changes it has effected. Perhaps surprisingly, given the media’s spectacularization of the nation’s revolutionary unrest, few international

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  previews May 2014

  “Douglas Coupland: Everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything”

  Since the 1980s, Douglas Coupland has been building novels around the alienated miasma of the just-arrived present: surplus stores, Snackwell’s, dead dolphins, semidisposable Swedish furniture. All along, the Canadian author, who first came to fame for his novels Generation X (1991) and Microserfs (1995), has been forging art alongside these zeitgeisty narratives, and now the Vancouver Art Gallery is hosting the first major survey of his work. Set to fill nearly ten thousand square feet on-site and spill into the city beyond, the show is organized according to such topics

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  print March 2014

  Larry Clark

  More than ten thousand of Larry Clark’s photographs were on view this winter in a small storefront on Forsyth Street in the Lower East Side. Clark—whose early work challenged fantasies of a wholesome postwar America with hard, often graphic images from his personal life—is represented by major galleries in New York, London, and Hong Kong. Yet, turning seventy-one and deciding he wanted to distribute a portion of his archive, he chose to do so not via private dealer-to-collector sale or auction, but on his own terms and in a way that would make it accessible to his friends—namely,

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  print January 2014

  Scott Reeder

  A row of thirty two-word text paintings ran the length of Scott Reeder’s recent inaugural show at Lisa Cooley. The variously twee and anarchic pronouncements were painted Ed Ruscha style in acrylic on small panels of stretched canvas (all works 2013), and began with COPS KISS, POST CATS, and FAKE RICH, continued with IFFY IDOL, REAL EVIL, and JPEG LIFE, and finally delivered the viewer to the rear of the gallery with JUST INFO, DARK MATH, and COOL SHIT. Across the room, and filling out the other walls of the main gallery space, luxuriously sized oil and enamel paintings radiated a pleasing

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  print October 2013

  Faig Ahmed

  Set along the Caspian Sea between Russia and Iran, present-day Azerbaijan is heir to a long and storied history. Scholars have speculated that the country’s southern forests are the site of the biblical Garden of Eden, while its oil-rich Absheron Peninsula fell victim to some of the Soviet Union’s most devastating acts of environmental destruction; in the intervening years, this easternmost Caucasus nation has been captured, conquered, and occupied by such formidable empires, kingdoms, and khanates as those of the Greeks, Parthians, Romans, Arabs, Turks, Mongols, Persians, Russians, and Soviets.